W. - B

In theaters. Rated PG-13, 128 minutes. Trailer.

When a President serves two terms, any informed American becomes intimately familiar with the narrative of his life. Our 43rd President, George W. Bush, is no exception. From his infamous party days, oil busts, religious awakening and problems with grammar, his is a familiar story to most. In W., Director Oliver Stone has put forth a deceivingly 'accurate' picture of the man who would be President. Click below for more on W., also known as Oliver Stone's Forrest Gump:

The film starts out with W. (an inspired Josh Brolin) pledging at Yale and proceeds non-linearly through his early days and Presidency. The anchor of the film is the lead up to the Iraq War and the Cabinet's discussions about how to sell the war to the American people. Those scenes are juxtaposed with a chronological account of all of the familiar Bush stories. Stone has two main themes, one focusing on W. personally and his family relationships and the other focusing on the failures of the W. administration, as perceived by Stone and writer Stanley Weiser (Wall Street).

I'll start with the second theme first. Most Americans pretty much agree that we wish we had a 'do over' with Iraq, and I am very interested in how the innerworkings of the administration came to recommend and carry out the Iraq War. Based mostly on the books that have come out from Bob Woodward and others, certain scenes seem accurate, while others have to be made up by their very nature, such as private lunches with Vice President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) and W. As President, W. is presented as incapable of the job and crushed under the weight of its responsibilities, while his advisors are presented as megalomaniacal (Cheney and Rove), clueless (Rumsfeld and Rice), sycophantic (Rice, Fleischer and Tenet), and lazy (Tenet). The strongest scenes were the cabinet meetings discussing the war, with each character playing their role prescribed, as prescribed by the Left. Colin Powell is at first made to be the hero, with his caution about Iraq and preference for not taking Baghdad, but he too "trades integrity for access" - one of the strongest (and probably most accurate) lines from the film.

While I don't buy this version of events, it is likely to be somewhere in the same zip code as reality, and Stone essentially lets W. off the hook for Iraq and hangs that albatross around the aforementioned coterie of inept and manipulative advisors.

The family dynamic is centered around the plight of every son with a larger than life father - how to live up to expectations and outrun the oversized shadow. In W.'s case, its even more difficult because of his smarter, more contemplative brother Jeb. In the film W. is presented as a ne'er do well (accurately), while Jeb is Poppy Bush's (James Cromwell) fair haired boy all set to follow in his footsteps while W. is shown being crushed by the "soft bigotry of low expectations" and can never escape the demons of his father.

In all, the film was somewhat interesting to watch, but I couldn't help but feel like it was just an adaptation of the multiple biographies of W. along with some New York Times reporting of the run up to the war. As with any Stone film, there are multiple interesting camera angles and cuts, along with a great surreal soundtrack. Still, I can't help but think this would've been a stronger film if it was farmed out to a semi-fictional character, such as in Primary Colors (B+), which was just a fictional version of Clinton.

The acting in the film is all fine, although Thandie Newton as Condoleeza Rice was such a caricature I couldn't tell if it was just bad acting or an intentional farce. Brolin may deserve an Oscar nod for his portrayal of a cocky, haunted man miscast as the lead in history.